The technological development of the last decades made it possible to accumulate a large amount of data on every aspect of our public or private life.

Not many of us know that a large part of those data are publicly available: several public administrations are already publishing large data sets, that citizen could use to generate innovative applications to change the way we live, move, use the city and the territory.

There is a clear gap between the opportunities offered by the abundance of open data and the citizens’ capability to imagine new ways of using such data.

OPEN4CITIZENS works to reduce such gap. It involves citizens into a co-design process (hackathons), together with IT experts, public administrations, interest groups and start-up companies, in order to develop new services to improve urban quality and certain aspects of their everyday life. The aim of the project is to raise citizens’ awareness about the opportunity offered by open data and create a new culture of innovation in public services.

In each of the five pilot locations (Copenhagen, Karlstad, Rotterdam, Milano and Barcelona) the project will also create physical or virtual locations (OpenDataLab) that will become the reference point for all citizens and interest groups that want to propose innovative applications based on open data.